* The user has to trust Retrace Server's administrator because of sensitive data that may be contained in the coredump.

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ABRT, a crash reporting tool in Fedora, now allows to prepare a part of crash processing remotely, on a server owned by Fedora Project. Remote coredump retracing leads to better quality of reports. Retrace server can generate good backtraces with much higher success rate than local retracing.

When ABRT generates a backtrace from a coredump, it needs debuginfo data to be available for the binary and all libraries involved in the crash. Debuginfo packages require a lot of storage space, and sometimes they are not available at all -- package update causes removal of older update of the same package and it's debuginfo.

Other problem is that GDB (which generates the backtrace from the coredump) needs data from the binary and libraries that were involved in the crash. If user updated some relevant package between observing the crash and reporting it, he might be unable to generate good quality backtrace because of updates. This happens often, because Fedora is updated frequently.

Retrace server is one possibility how to solve these issues. ABRT offers user to upload her/his coredump to a remote server, and the retracing step happens there. The server creates an environment identical with what was on user's computer at the time of the crash, by installing all the required packages and their debuginfo. The retrace server is able to do that because it keeps all the older packages from updates, and relevant part of updates-testing locally on the server.

After creating the backtrace, only the submitter is allowed to download/view it.

Script's output includes raw HTTP response containig X-Task-Id and X-Task-Password headers. You may ask the retrace server about three things using these headers:

Status - HTTP response contains X-Task-Status header with one of three values 'PENDING', 'FINISHED_SUCCESS', 'FINISHED_FAILURE'. wget may be used to show the output (the HTTP response body is the same as X-Task-Status header's value):

ABRT, a crash reporting tool in Fedora, now allows to prepare a part of crash processing remotely, on a server owned by Fedora Project. Remote coredump retracing leads to better quality of reports. Retrace server can generate good backtraces with much higher success rate than local retracing.